


JediStormPilot Snippets

by ninemoons42



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Books, Bread, Character Study, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family Reunions, Finn Being Introspective, Finn repairs the jacket of OT3 and feels, First Kiss, Flowers, Food, Food Issues, Force Ghost Qui-Gon Jinn, Force Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Holding Hands, Hot Chocolate, Hurt/Comfort, I Blame Tumblr, Inspired by Music, La Diada di Sant Jordi, Lightsabers, M/M, Multi, OT3, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Rain, References to David Bowie, Rey Kenobi, Rey is Obi-Wan's granddaughter, Roses, Sparring, Spoilers, St. George's Day, Stranded, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, jedistormpilot, stranded in space
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-05-08 10:06:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 20,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5493311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe and Finn and Rey, with the occasional meddling from a particularly shippy (and sometimes snippy) BB-8 droid.</p><p>Will feature other characters in cameos because that's how I roll.</p><p>There will be spoilers here, so please be careful when you click.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. whispering words on the wind

Poe Dameron limps back to base, and Jessika and Snap made it back alive but so many others didn’t -– and that included a legend -– and what was the point in that, he wonders, as he woodenly strips off his gear. 

Concerned chirping around his feet. He looks down. The BB-8 is expressive and torn, he thinks, because it did something great today but it also carries the same grief that everyone else is carrying.

It cheeps at him and it takes him a moment to make sense of the name -– which, how silly of him, how addled is he, he wonders, from the adrenaline rush and the adrenaline crash and now the immense sadness that he can’t stop breathing in. Breath after breath and closer to tears with every second. He doesn’t _want_ to think about the General’s condition. He -– should he avoid her?

Follow BB-8. The droid knows where it’s going. Mournful chirping and slow head-shaking.

Poe follows it to the medical quarters and then -– he hears the voice.

Rough from disuse, broken with tears, jagged with worry: he’s only really become familiar with the voice, with the young woman, in the past few hours, but -– he needs to move to her side. He needs to sit with someone, and she’s there, two hands wound tight around one of Finn’s.

And Rey is singing. 

She sounds so heartbroken and the song splinters and shivers and he has never heard anything so sad and sweet before.

She stares at him when she clocks him there. Glances at BB-8, who chirps at her, and she must take it for reassurance because she cuts off her song and says, “He’s still sleeping. They won’t be waking him up for a while.”

“All right,” Poe says, and he pulls up a rickety chair. Sits on the opposite side of the bed. Leans his forehead onto the sheets and wraps his hands around Finn’s wrist. Cool material under his fingertips, the bandages sealing laser-burned and bacta-healed skin.

Maybe he cries. Maybe he doesn’t. He just tries to listen to his own heartbeat, his own breathing.

A hand atop his head -– he doesn’t push those gentle rough fingertips away -– he reaches out. A linen-wrapped arm. 

And Rey sings again. Soft-sanded lullaby.

He holds on to her, to Finn.


	2. a tight fit

Rey carefully untangles her feet –- one from under Finn’s backside and the other from somewhere in the small of Poe’s back –- and she very carefully does not glare at the BB-8 that she knows is looking in at them from the lip of the improvised cargo hold.

Well.

Cargo hold _nothing_ –- what they’re all currently doing, sprawled out in a heap of limbs and bruises in one of the smugglers’ hidey-holes aboard the _Millennium Falcon_ –- is a damned mystery to her, and she has no idea but she thinks that the droid _might_ have it in for them.

Or Han might, she really wouldn’t put anything past him.

Even so: this is a really nice situation to be in, once she gets over the basic indignity of it.

Because Poe and Finn are arguing very quietly about who has to sit in the other’s lap. (Hidey-holes: they’re cramped beyond belief. And there are quite a few sharp edges in the sides of the damned thing.) Because Poe is practically kissing Finn with every other word they’re that piled in close to each other.

And here she is looking like an idiot, her feet next to Poe’s shoulder and dammit, she wants to be _next to her boys_.

So she hisses at the two of them. “Scoot over.”

“Care to tell us _how_?” Finn snarks. “Han said stay out of sight, and the only way we’re going to get to move is if we lift that panel over our heads.”

“Not happening,” Poe drawls, very quietly.

“Not happening but _stay still_ unless you want a knee or an elbow in the wrong place.” And she moves. Very carefully. Very quietly. She’s been in cramped spaces before. -– Well, none as cramped as this. -- But she can maneuver, a little, though not without Finn clamping his hand over Poe’s mouth when she carefully puts her weight on him for just a moment.

She returns a sheepish smile -- and a kiss to the tip of his nose –- when Poe glares mutely at her.

But yes, she does achieve her desired result.

Curled up in both of their laps.

“Oh, I could get used to this,” and Finn’s words tickle the strands escaping from one of her braids. (It’s a new hairstyle. She may or may not be emulating the General.)

“Next time I’m sitting in your laps,” Poe mutters, and Rey leans her cheek against his chest, and feels Finn’s arms wrap around her.

Now it’s quiet.


	3. stolen comfort

Waking, waking, waking –- it feels like a long slog, like a long walk, and he’s crossed a desert in white baking heavy armor –- but this is even slower. It’s like he’s dragging the weight of an AT-AT with him, tied to his legs, pulling him back with every step.

Burning, burning, burning, along his skin. Nerves slashed and frayed and aflame, the pain spinning into some kind of white-hot nothingness that prickled and pricked insistently. He itches and he shivers and he moans, softly, _No no no,_ flaring flashing _evil_ red in the snow-touched artificial night.

 _Red!_ Hateful! Rage! A man in a black mask standing over Rey, burning her – Finn can’t – he has to get up, he has to help, he’s too weak and he needs to _wake_ -– 

“Hey.”

A voice. He knows that voice.

Instinctively, Finn reaches out.

A hand around his.

What a struggle it is to open his eyes and –- finally, he does. Dark hair and a weary friendly face. A pained smile. 

“Poe,” Finn says. His voice is little more than a croak.

“You look better than I feel,” Poe mutters.

“I feel like -– bantha shit.”

“But you’re awake and you’re breathing and you’ve still got bacta in you, healing, so you’ll be up and about in no time.”

“And you? Do you need healing?”

Poe shakes his head. “Not hurt. Not physically anyway.”

“But you’re hurting.” A new voice, another voice that Finn reaches out to. What does she need? Is Rey still crying?

She sits with Poe. Smooths his hair back from his drawn eyes. Finn aches, but not because he wishes it was him –- he wishes he could do something for Poe, too.

“You were there,” Poe says, voice gone rough and low.

“We saw everything,” Rey replies.

A death on a catwalk.

“I –- we heard -– ” Poe can’t finish the sentence.

Rey shakes her head. Is she out of words? Finn watches as she cups her hands around Poe’s face, as she pulls him closer. As she touches her lips to Poe’s forehead. 

Poe kisses her back, fleeting, pained – and then Finn is blinking, because Poe is leaning towards him, eyes closing, warm gentle weight of his closed sweet mouth.

Finn tries to return the gesture as best as he can, and then: “Rey,” he says. 

She smiles, tears glittering in her eyes, and kisses him.

Everything hurts, but everything hurts _less_. A little less.


	4. hot chocolate relief

There are paths winding in and around the base, and there are people walking those paths at all hours, and to Rey it is only early in the evening, but many of the others she’s seen are already preparing to bunk down for the night.

She’s never even considered that there are different day/night cycles. All she knows are Jakku’s stinging sunlight and freezing nights, the long hours and the whispering winds passing, keeping her awake and aware.

She squeezes past a handful of yawning techs -- only some of them humanoid in form -- and turns a corner, and then she stops dead, because there is a woman in the corridor and she is short and hunched over and she’s General Organa. She’s Leia. 

“I’m so sorry,” Rey says, _again_ , and she wants to take the words back because she’s already said them over and over and what need does _General Leia Organa_ have of her words?

She’s on her way back to the corner when there’s a whisper behind her. “Rey. Hello.” A very audible very quiet sob. But the woman who turns, who looks at Rey, only wears a kind of worn-down kindness on her face. “I was looking for you.”

“Tell me what I need to do,” Rey murmurs.

A watery little chuckle. “Stand down, I’m not giving you any orders. Merely -- a suggestion.”

Rey stands her ground. Watches Leia as she comes closer. Nothing faltering or unsteady in her stride. There is something in Leia’s hands that is a small papery box, light, a little worse for wear around the edges. “What is this?” Rey asks, after a moment.

“Oh, of course, instructions,” Leia says, kindly. “Two large spoonfuls to a mug of hot water. Mix well, let cool just a little, so you don’t scorch your tongue. Then drink up. It’s -- it’s curiously soothing. Take it to Poe, too, he’s got a weakness for that stuff.”

“What is this stuff called exactly?”

“Something from Lando,” Leia murmurs. “Hot chocolate. He was sorry he couldn’t send me any more of the white sweet things he puts on top.”

“And -- not to be rude -- but you’re giving me and Poe some?”

“If you don’t need it now,” Leia says, “you’ll need it later. We all reach for some kind of comfort. Keep it. You’ll want it, eventually.” 

And Rey watches Leia as she passes out of sight, heading back up the corridor to somewhere else on the base.

She turns, too, and she passes back towards the infirmary, and there are footsteps tromping in her wake, but she knows it’s Poe even before BB-8 rolls chittering into view.

“Is that -- ” he begins.

Rey smiles, and passes the box to him. “She mentioned you specifically. So maybe you should keep this, since you’re familiar with it.”

His eyes bug out just a little. His tanned hands fold around hers. “Me. General Leia Organa sent me hot chocolate.” Disbelief in the lines around his smile. 

She nods, and pushes past, and sits next to Finn’s bed. He breathes, and he sleeps, and he doesn’t respond, not even when BB-8 pokes a metallic little pincer into his thigh.

“Wake up,” Rey murmurs, and she takes his hand in both of hers and presses her forehead to their joined knuckles.

“Wake up,” says another voice, familiar -- she leans into a warmth that she knows. 

“Poe,” Rey says. 

He’s wrapped in a sweet-scented fug, earthy-sugar. Two mugs. 

She has to let go of Finn in order to take the other mug, and she’s reluctant, but one whiff of the hot-chocolate scent and she feels a little better already.

“Drink up -- carefully,” Poe says.

She ends up leaning into him as they sip at their drinks and watch over Finn.

“Did you -- ” she begins, when a thought strikes.

“I left most of it for him,” Poe finishes.

“He might like sweet things. We don’t know that.”

“We’ll be around to find out. It’ll be fun to find out.”

She nods, and holds his free hand.

She feels him press a kiss to her temple.

They wait.


	5. we are the dreamers

He dreams of muggy jungle familiarity, the overgrown green smell of lukewarm sluggish water and the everpresent stink of spacecraft fuel, and it’s almost right, it’s almost home, it’s the first place that he really remembers but why are the trees sloughing away, the vines and the creeping things shifting and slithering and the scream dies a choking death just behind his teeth when the leaves and the water trickle away into sleek black nothing, into the blurry outline of a hand reaching for him -- reaching _into_ him -- he fights and he can’t move, he can’t run, there’s something or someone in his thoughts, ferreting out the things he holds close, the things that comfort him, leaving him a jagged mess of tears and --

_Here. I’m here. Take my hand._

Cool cool contact on his shoulder. Rough fingertips and sun-bronzed skin, but there’s something right about this touch, there’s someone here who can bring him out of this terrible black winding choking space. He gropes toward that touch, grasps the hand that is not gloved in black and violation.

He can barely hold on, but that seems to be enough: the dark walls recede and so does that predatory shadow, that thieving presence.

Emerging not into the jungle that had been torn from him. No. This place is wide open, bright blue skies skirling above him, and the oddly musical slide of footsteps against sand, and the hand that he is holding belongs to a linen-clad shape, trailing loose sleeves.

The sun beats a gentle insistent warmth into his shoulders. It’s a comfort, too. It’s something else, something completely different, something that pulls him after his rescuer, up and up, climbing a softly winding slope and at the peak he catches a glimpse of something familiar, something he knows like the networks of veins in the backs of his hands. S-foils and a sleek long arrow shape.

The way back home.

He turns to the other person. He is still holding on to that sand-scoured sun-baked shapely hand. _Thank you,_ he -- says? Thinks? He can hear no sounds in this dream, though he can feel the wind that riffles through his hair, that tugs at the other person’s hems. 

_Together,_ the other person replies. _Together we can push away the nightmares. Yours and mine and his._

 _His?_ But he already knows the answer. 

_Come help us,_ says the other person, and then he catches a glimpse of desert-lined eyes, of sun-streaked dark hair, and he knows who this is, there’s a name on the tip of his tongue -- 

Poe Dameron wakes up to the proximity alerts. To BB-8 chirping rapid-fire at him, questions and assessments.

For a moment he thinks he smells desert sand in the cockpit of his X-wing, and at the right time he throws himself out of hyperspace, familiar coordinates already scrolling up on his displays, and he can hardly breathe for the need to get back, to find --

*

Snow, and unnatural night, and grief and rage and pain settling heavily in his skin, and up ahead there is a flash of bright blue light, driving away the terrible red shadows, the scorched trails in the ice beneath his feet.

He struggles, as best as he can. Is he on his feet? Is he crawling? No matter. He needs to get away from here, to get away from the strange shell separating him from the world all around. Muted sounds and smells, the rasp of recycled air, the utter absence of _touch_. He can’t feel the rocks that he’s moving on. He can see their jagged edges, sort of -- clouds in the corners of his eyes -- he can see slick liquid on their surfaces and he can feel his hands growing weaker, slipping, but he’s missing the connections. What is happening to him? Why is it so hard to _move_? And move he must, there’re voices calling him, there’re people waiting for him -- his people? More than just the men and women marching with him, lockstep after lockstep.

 _Come on, come on,_ the voices say.

These voices do not berate him. Do not hurt him. These voices urge him to keep going. 

Sometimes he thinks he hears beeping and sometimes he hears soft sobs.

 _Please,_ the voices say.

 _I can, I can, I can,_ he says, over and over again. He makes himself believe. He makes himself repeat the words. His voice sounds strange, as though it were confined within his bones, within whatever it is that is enclosing him.

Is there a way out?

Faint insistent mutter of pain along his spine. He grits his teeth and ignores it. The voices are more important, the voices are calling him --

He’s being lifted to his feet. 

_We’re waiting for you,_ the voices say.

_We need you._

He clings to those words, as though they were hands, clasped tight around both of his, alternately pulling and pushing him forward. _Don’t leave me,_ he says. 

The voices whisper to him through the pain, and the slowness, and the curious disconnection from his senses. He thinks he hears a chirp, a roar, a quiet hopeful murmur. 

There’s a quiet thrum mixed in with the beat of his heart.

He keeps going, groping through the darkness, through the cold and through the isolation, and -- 

Finn opens his eyes, and there is something completely unfamiliar about the ceiling, which is the first thing he sees. For one thing, it’s not black tiles, neatly tessellated black squares marching rank on rank -- he’s still looking at tiles, but they’re overgrown with clinging vines and haphazard wiring, and the hum of working generators.

“There you are, sir, it’s quite a good thing to see you open your eyes,” says a friendly metallic voice. He blinks and tries to turn his head, and the room spins dizzily around him, and he very carefully does not cry out or dry-heave -- and the droid that rolls carefully to his side nods its blocky head, and shows its pincerlike hands. “We have applied several strains of treatment to your injuries and you seem to be responding well to them.”

“I remember -- ” And this time he does choke on the words. Blazing red blades in his memory.

“You were nearly killed by a lightsaber,” the droid says. “It has been a very long time since we have had to deal with such injuries.”

“I need to -- ” He looks around, and there’s nothing he knows in this room, except for a brown jacket at the foot of his bed. 

The droid makes a comforting sound. “Your companions have been sent out on assignment, but they have left messages for you.” It indicates a datapad on the small table to the side.

Finn takes the datapad. A handful of new files. He flips to the first one, and voices rise up around him.

*

Eventually, she exchanges the crash and the sough of waves and wind against rock for the thrum of engines in hyperspace, and as she always has, she curls herself up small in her sleep and lets the white noise wrap around her, lets the white noise fall softly through her.

The desert had never really been silent, and now she’s been to other places, and the constant whispers in the night are her companions.

She thinks that might be her connection to -- whatever it is that’s been kindled within her. The _power_ that flows in her.

When she sleeps, carefully belted into the pilot’s chair at Chewie’s gently growling insistence, she can feel the ship, and she can see what has happened on it, in the shifting landscape of her dreams.

A young presence training with an older one. Blast shield down, lack of vision, and the taunting whistle of a training bot just out of reach. A game of virtual pieces on a real board, data-combat, and a smirk filled with teeth. This very ship moving beneath a very different set of hands, a loud shocking scrape that was nonetheless drowned in pursuing explosions.

Quiet footsteps hither and thither. Conversations and jokes about committees and far _far_ too many echoes in the tiny medbay. Multiple sets of hands working over countlessly intricate cross-wired systems.

Sometimes, in the moments before waking, she thinks she feels a presence standing over her in the cockpit, worn and rough and cynical in the extreme, full of guile and full of concern and _love_ for this spacecraft, for all the people who had been in it.

She wakes, then, but not to proximity alerts. A rounded dome of a head next to her, and excited blue-and-red lights. She blinks, and tilts her head. “Artoo.”

 _Message message message,_ R2-D2 chirps at her.

“For me?” 

The droid responds by projecting a beam of blue holo-light onto the floor.

“Rey!”

“Poe,” she breathes, and she reaches out to the image and her fingertips pass through unruly curls and an exuberant smile. 

“He woke up, Finn’s awake, and I heard from the General you were on your way back -- I’m supposed to be off on missions but Jess and Snap are filling in for me, I’m staying right here at the base, we’re waiting for you -- ”

And tears fill her eyes, and she feels the smile that threatens to crack at the edges.

Artoo plays the message again at her request, and she throws a glance at the consoles, notes estimates of time of arrival and she wonders if there isn’t anything she might be able to do to speed the _Falcon_ along.

A step behind her, not virtual at all. A real boot, and a real man, sighing as he settles into the co-pilot’s seat.

She makes to rise, and he shakes his head. 

She’s not expecting a story. 

“There was a code, once, and there were people who insisted vehemently on the things in that code,” Luke Skywalker says, in a rasp of a whisper. “A code that insisted on _no attachments_ , despite the mounting evidence against it.”

“Against it?” Rey asks.

“If you have no attachments,” he says, “then you have nothing to fight for. Nothing to _live_ for. A cause can only take you so far. It’s a hard lesson to learn, for someone like me -- I hope that it will be easier for you. You seem to have made a good start.”

She thinks of Finn, and of Poe, and of how good it will be to see them again.

She whispers their names, when she’s alone again in the cockpit, and she lets herself hope that they’ll hold her close.


	6. at table

She curls herself up small on the rickety chair, and she breathes in and out for her friend. Finn. Unconscious after Starkiller, red-blade burns in his skin. 

She waits. She has to wait. She has to be here for him, because he had been the first person to ask her if she was all right, because she had never heard that question before and he hadn’t even known her name when he asked her if she was all right.

She waits, and her stomach rumbles and she’s used to hunger. She’s used to those pangs, quiet twinging just beneath her ribs. 

“Rey,” someone says from nearby.

She looks up. Fumbles for the name. She knows this man by his strong arms, by the lines in his face that deepen when he smiles. They are there, too, in the worry that is etched around his eyes. “Poe,” she murmurs.

“He won’t be waking up for a while yet. It’s okay if you want to get something to eat. Something to drink.”

She blinks at him. Food. “What do I need to do in order to get some food? Is there a task I can complete first?”

And she blinks when he gapes at her for several moments. The harsh overhead lights pick out faint silver strands in his hair. 

“Come with me,” he says, after a moment. And: “BB-8, watch over him for us.”

The round little droid emits a series of encouraging bleeps, and rolls up to Finn’s side, and tilts its head forward as if to regard him closely.

Rey takes Poe’s hand, and he leads her into the mess hall, and she stops in the doorway and stares. There’s a man standing over the steaming trays, yawning and scratching at the cloth covering his hair. Someone brushes past her, an orange flight suit murmuring quiet words full of consonants, and that pilot asks for a bowl of soup and is given one and isn’t charged anything. Two techs come in from another entrance, still covered in engine grime, and they ask for cups of something steaming and are sent off with an extra little foil-wrapped pack.

Poe leads her forward, past Lieutenant Connix who wanders in, picks at loose threads in the collar of her tunic, and finally walks off with a small bright-yellow fruit that she sniffs happily before stuffing into her mouth whole.

“I don’t understand,” Rey says, and her own words sound tiny and shocked. Food, so much food, and no one was paying for it -– no credits changing hands, no barter, no trade –- just requests, quickly granted.

“Do you want to try something that isn’t a ration pack?” Poe asks, and he sounds like he really wants to hear her answer. Is that what people call kindness? 

She blinks. “What –- what’s there to eat?”

“Let’s find out.” 

A large plate, and a little of everything, and Poe takes a particular delight in putting two dark-crumbed bread rolls on top, and the man who serves them nods and passes her a metallic container. It’s cold, and that’s real water beading on the outsides, and she shivers when she puts both hands around it, pleased and surprised.

Poe winds his way back to Finn’s room, and they sit together on the floor. Vegetable stew, sweet nut paste, dried fruit, and a round sweet disc that falls apart into crumbs on her tongue. 

She eats with her hands. She licks her fingers. She eats most of the two rolls. Poe seems to not mind that she’s ravenous and tentative at the same time. All he says is that he carries small packs of the sweet nut paste in his pockets when he’s got to be flying a long mission.

“Finn was – he was a stormtrooper,” Rey says, eventually, when the plate’s been scraped clean. “What do stormtroopers eat?”

Poe makes a series of faces. “I don’t want to think about it,” is all he says. And: “He has to try some of the stuff you just ate.”

“He has to try all of it.”

“And you’ve just gotten started. Wait till we get to other places. You’ve never had fish before, wait till we get the next shipment in from Naboo. They send us the dried stuff and there’s a cook who knows how to make the best soup out of it.”

“Fish,” Rey repeats, wonderingly. “I want to eat fish. With you. And Finn.”

“Let’s all stay alive,” Poe murmurs. “So much we all need to try.”

“You too?”

He grins, and looks like a boy, the silver and the lines falling away. “Oh, yeah. Lots of places I haven’t been to. Lots of things I haven’t tried. It’s a big galaxy.”

She nods, and she takes his hand.

She reaches out to Finn.

There are still crumbs on her hands.


	7. space oddity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for David Bowie. Walk among the stars, beautiful mind.

There’s soup and tea and some more of those sweet intricately-whorled fruits she’d first discovered, peeled and presented upon Maz Kanata’s table, and Rey is more than grateful for the jumpsuit that had somehow appeared in her bunk, because they’re sheltering on a world of ice and nights that were even colder than the ones she barred her AT-AT doors tight against on Jakku, and she can see her breath come out in plumes whether she’s meditating or dancing through her staff forms or, as now, sitting on her cold hands in the mess hall.

She wants to eat, she doesn’t want to waste the steam wafting up from her bowl of soup. Rich spices and hearty root vegetables and the unexpected treat of fresh fish. She’s acquired a taste for the stuff. She thinks she can taste seawater every time tender white flesh flakes off translucent sharp-sided bones. Different seas, different places, different fish, and all of them toothsome and savory. 

Finally, finally, there’s Poe, and he nods to the other pilots and hurries through the mess line by himself. She sits up straighter as he makes a beeline for her, as he puts an arm around her shoulders and plants a kiss on her cheek.

A distracted kiss, she thinks, and she tilts her head at the way he’s got his free hand clenched into a fist.

The lines in the corners of his eyes are familiar, but today they’re deeper, more firmly etched into him, and she wriggles away from his grasp. Instead she takes that hand in both of hers. 

“Thanks,” he says.

“Finn?” she asks.

“Last I saw him he was just finishing up his target practice.”

“He’ll be hungry,” Rey says.

“We all are. Something about this cold.”

“Should we eat without him?”

But they’re both saved from having to think about that when Finn skids into the mess hall, and Rey clicks her tongue fondly because there’s a fresh blaster-singe line on the sleeve of his jacket. It’s not Poe’s jacket, that one is securely tucked under her pillow, but it’s a new one, lined with extra-warming material. Finn tends to wear it with its collar turned up.

She leans against Poe and waits for Finn to get through the line, and then he’s sitting on her other side.

Now she feels warm.

“Let’s eat,” Poe says, but she still thinks he sounds a little subdued. She wonders what he’s thinking about.

“What’s with the long face?” Finn asks, when they’re all picking at the crumbs on their plates.

Poe’s smile turns wistful and pained, and Rey frowns. She gets to her feet. She sits down on his other side. Now he’s the one pinned between her and Finn. She puts both arms around his waist. “What are you remembering? That’s, that’s the face you have when you’re thinking about things. Good things, but not always happy things.” She frowns. The words aren’t quite right.

“I remembered a song,” Poe says, after a moment.

On his other side, Finn makes a noise that is halfway between _concerned_ and _we need to cheer Poe up_. 

Rey agrees, wholeheartedly.

And then she’s distracted because Poe starts to hum, and she can feel that rumble of bittersweet melody without having to reach out for his emotions, and she holds on to him more tightly.

“Commencing countdown, engines on,” Poe sings, softly, before falling back into the humming, a melancholy progression of notes that makes Finn sigh.

She takes his hand, eagerly, and they pin Poe tightly between them, and when Poe lapses into a gentle sad silence she says, “Tell me about the song?”

“There’s not much to remember about it. I think the rest of the words haven’t really survived. I heard a version of it from my mother, but even when she was singing it to me she only had that one line of lyrics to go on.”

“The music’s still there, though,” Finn says. “It’s, it’s good music. I want to learn it. What did your mother call it?”

And Rey smiles, because Finn has a lovely voice when he can be coaxed into singing, usually when she’s right on the verge of falling asleep as she’s pinned between and beneath both of them.

“She didn’t call it anything,” Poe says. “But I heard another version of it, and that one was called ʻCan you hear me Major Tom?’”

Rey blinks, and hums a little of the tune back to him, and she still doesn’t understand why the music should make her think of a call for help, of a blue-sky world with seas and mountains and a heart of fire, of lightning tinged red and blue.

“I didn’t sing that song for a long time,” Poe says, after an interval of quiet warmth. “I thought I’d forgotten it, or lost it.”

She feels him shudder, and she kisses the nearest part of him she can reach, which is his throat and the pulse that beats steadily in his skin.

“We can help you remember it, now,” Finn says, and Rey knows that he means to sing the single line, mostly under his breath.

She joins her voice to his, and they hum, together, for Poe.


	8. the way you convinced me to dance in the rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, look at [THIS AMAZING ART](http://shorelle.tumblr.com/post/137466779565/here-we-are-now-with-the-falling-sky-and-the-rain) by shorelle.
> 
> That's it that's the fic.
> 
> And also Leia razzing on Luke just because.

He’s getting better at walking on his own two feet again, Finn thinks, here in this place of slightly-greater-than-human-tolerances gravity, in this place where the Resistance has been quietly regrouping and retraining and recovering. It doesn’t hurt so much when he gets up and when he steps up to the firing line on the makeshift range, doesn’t hurt so much when the targets light up in front of him and he snatches the blaster from the shelf just at chest height and starts to fire. Red lights going on overhead, signaling direct and correct hits. Speed drills, he thinks, and every once in a while the targets fire back, and he has to factor the dodge into the movements of his arms and shoulders and hips and feet.

Though right now BB-8 probably has the right idea, scolding him fondly and rapidfire electronically, in the common droid-language that he’s still trying to wrap his head around. He thinks BB-8 must think him clumsy and odd, getting another laser-singe down the sleeve of what used to be Poe Dameron’s jacket. He’s getting better at patching it up, though. Snap Wexley has already teased him about opening up shop. The other pilots have wrecked bits of jacket and coat, torn-up and abused leathers, and Finn has learned to work small wonders with scrounged-up conditioners and a small collection of threaded needles.

(It beat having to stare up at the ceiling or at the opposite wall. Four weeks of being cooped up within the same four walls as his skin and muscles and spine knit back together. He still wakes up to terrifying dreams of red flame lancing up his back.)

But right now BB-8 is playing a game of “knock Finn in the back of his knees” and he’s thinking of telling the persnickety droid off when -- 

“Bad feelings?” 

And Finn draws up short. Bad enough that he’s wandering again, what is he doing in officers’ quarters when his rooms (next to Rey’s and next to Poe’s) are two floors up from here, and that voice, graveled with command and the years, can only belong to General Organa. Kriff. He’s on her floor? He’s near her suite? He really _has_ gotten lost. 

He stops and flattens himself to the nearest corridor wall, and prays he can slip past, and he’s psyching himself up to run for his life, but -- 

“I seem to be missing my -- my student.”

Finn glances at BB-8.

Who, impassive and without a face, manages to radiate surprise at him anyway.

“What’s _he_ doing here,” Finn whispers, “ _he_ never goes on the base, _he_ kind of lives apart from everyone else -- ”

“That’s -- careless of you,” General Organa murmurs. “And anyway can’t you sense her?”

Finn thinks, against all odds, that she sounds amused.

“Because _you_ can,” Jedi Master Luke Skywalker says.

“I can, yes, because I’m not distracted, unlike certain other people.”

“Water’s not a distraction,” Skywalker says. “I lived in a cave over water for years. I learned to fish.”

“Good for you,” General Organa says. “So don’t get distracted. Your student’s on the base, she’s just experiencing rain for the first time. Surely you can spare her for an hour or two.”

Finn looks at BB-8.

BB-8 stares solemnly back.

“Finn,” General Organa says.

Oh no.

Finn winces, and steps toward her, revealing himself at the T-intersection near her open door. 

He can only see that Skywalker’s mouth is twitching; he can’t parse what it actually means.

“Go find Rey,” General Organa says. “Bring her an umbrella if you want -- there’re buckets of them next to the exits -- but tell her to dry off completely when she comes back in. No one here is interested in seeing her catch her death of a cold.”

“People still get colds?” Finn asks. 

Now it’s the General’s mouth that twitches. “Hmm. Do you mean to tell me that the First Order has thoroughly eradicated that virus? That might be useful intelligence to obtain. I should let the slicers know. Some people might very well appreciate it.”

Skywalker sighs, and pokes a metal finger at the General’s shoulder, and in that gesture Finn sees them as -- well, the history videos _did_ eventually point out that they were brother and sister, that they were Darth Vader’s twins. Now he can see that they look almost the same when they’re trying not to laugh -- the General at her brother, and Skywalker at some rueful joke. Pursed lips and raised eyebrows. 

But he’s still confused, and so he acknowledges the orders, intending to move along. “I’ll -- I’ll just go and get Rey, then.”

“Come on in,” he thinks he hears the General say, as he heads toward the nearest set of stairs. “I have hot chocolate.”

“I hoped you still had some,” he thinks he hears Skywalker say, in response.

But right now: umbrella, Rey, dry off, don’t die from a cold.

He jogs down corridors, dodges around droids and other beings, and looks for the nearest exit -- and next to it he finds a battered metal canister, hip-tall on him, full of dripping colorful things. 

BB-8 bobs curiously at his feet.

“Umbrella?” he says, out loud, and he takes one of the objects from the canister. There’s a hooked handle and a button, and he presses it, wondering if he should have braced himself for a shot -- 

Oh. Cloth-like material stretched onto a wire-frame, vaguely dome-shaped. He can see how it could be useful in a rainstorm. He knows rain dripping onto armor and getting into the blacks at the joints, but this could actually work, this could actually keep him properly dry -- 

“That for me?”

And Finn blinks. Brightens up. Launches himself forward and he’s throwing his arms around a grinning Poe Dameron’s shoulders, to the cacophony of BB-8’s pleased greetings. 

“Good to see the two of you again, too,” Poe says, and: “I’ve been hearing rumors ever since I dropped out of hyperspace, are Rey and Skywalker really here?”

“Yes, except that he seems to have lost her,” Finn says. “I think it might have something to do with the rain. It doesn’t rain on Jakku, does it?”

“I don’t think it does, or at least we’d never know,” Poe says. Finn can see his eyes tracking toward the umbrella. “So you’re -- you’re going out after her? Can I go with?”

An electronic snort. Finn looks down. BB-8 is wagging its headpiece. 

“No, yeah, I know you don’t like being in water,” Poe says. “You stay here. We’ll be right back.”

Finn has to huddle under the umbrella, if he wants to make sure Poe is covered properly, too. The rain shifts with every breeze and soon their shoulders and sleeves are damp. “She can’t have gotten that far, can she?”

“No idea, but let’s hope,” Poe says.

Trees and grass and all kinds of bushes hug the outlines of the buildings around them. Now and then they pass someone rushing to get out of the nonstop rain. The weather presses in around them, wet cold weight, but not unnatural. There are trees with leaves shaped like so many green-veined cups. They collect water, store it for future use. It feels strange, but it feels right.

“Glad you feel that way,” Poe says, and Finn blinks. “You said that out loud.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t mind.”

It’s so easy to be around Poe, Finn thinks.

The path, overgrown and leaf-littered beneath their boots, trails away into lush greens.

But Finn turns left and listens, and he can hear -- 

“There,” Poe says, pointing.

Movement in a clearing, and a familiar silhouette --

Rey is standing in the center of the clearing, next to a tree with those cup-leaves, and the rain has turned her brown-gray linens into flattened straggling layers. The rain has flattened the trailing wisps of her hair against her cheeks, against her throat. Her face is tipped up to the downpour. She’s not shivering, she’s not smiling, and her eyes are closed and her hands hang at her sides.

“Hello,” Rey says, without opening her eyes.

Finn looks at her, looks at the umbrella.

Makes a decision: he closes the umbrella. Puts it down in the grass. The rain is cold on his forehead, on his ears, on his scalp.

But when he steps to Rey’s side and takes the hand that she offers him, he doesn’t feel so cold any more.

Poe steps up to her other side, and takes her other hand.

Rey says, “Close your eyes,” gently, and he can’t help but follow. “Listen to the rain with me.”

He wants to. But he also has a message to deliver. “The General doesn’t want you to catch your death of a cold.”

“I won’t. I’ll come in with you soon. But -- you’re here. Will you listen to the rain with me?”

“Yes,” Poe says, and Finn nods, and that is that.

He closes his eyes, and holds Rey’s hand, and the rain falls.


	9. some assembly required

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I asked around for some TFA prompts on my [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/), and I got two separate but very similar ideas from [johanirae](http://johanirae.tumblr.com/) and [keire-ke](http://keire-ke.tumblr.com/): they both asked for something with Poe and a lightsaber.

Grime on her hands, grease on her cheeks, dust fuzzing the strands of her hair and clinging to her padawan braid: but Poe couldn’t help but feel the cascading emotions that rolled off Rey in waves, as a bright yellow crystal hovered before her, slowly disappearing beneath the components of a lightsaber pike. Shroud and emitter and power cells and the ridges of an extended handgrip: they shivered and spun in circles but they held steady, orbiting her, slowly coming together.

Next to him Finn twitched, and made a motion as though to wipe the sweat off his brow: and Poe, too, wanted some way to root himself in place, to make no movements toward the girl in the middle of the small clearing, to make sure nothing would disturb her -- not even himself, not even his own emotions.

But pride, that had to be pride and awe welling up like fires suddenly blooming in the spaces beneath his heart: like the sudden blast-boost of sublight engines kicking into roaring powerful life, like the spiraling sweeping rolling maneuvering of a dogfight, like the perfect clarity of lining up turbolasers on a target, of sniping a TIE fighter right where it would cause the most damage.

So he gripped Finn’s hand more tightly and slouched more determinedly against the side of a tree and kept his eyes on Rey: and she was pale and jubilant and there was a final _click_.

A sleek, slender metal shaft punctuated by a series of longitudinal handgrips. Two end sections with wider diameters, each with its own activation assembly. 

He watched Rey get up and assume a typical ready stance: her dominant foot slightly forward and her weight carefully evenly distributed, the lightsaber pike held easily in her hand.

 _Snap-hiss_ , one after another, and each blade was just a little longer than the length of Poe’s own arm, and the bright yellow plasma threw Rey’s face into triumphant relief. 

Next to Poe, Finn broke into applause -- and from a nearby outcropping of moss-covered rocks, where it had been watching and patrolling, BB-8 contributed a happy trumpeting fanfare.

And Rey smiled -- then smoothly pivoted on one foot and sent something arcing through the green-scented air in Poe’s direction.

 _Thump_ , and the weight in Poe’s hands was something familiar, something he’d seen in hazy childhood memories of meeting a black-clad Luke Skywalker with a single leather glove -- and more recently he’d seen this very lightsaber hanging from Rey’s belt. “Why am I holding this?”

“It’s all right,” Rey said, soothing. 

“Like this,” Finn said, and Poe copied him, pulling the lightsaber up to a guard position, elbows up, the weapon at shoulder height -- his thumb sliding hesitantly along the activation lever. Hum and hiss of plasma, blue light on his face.

“If you expect me to fight you -- ” Poe began.

But Rey laughed and shook her head. “If you don’t think I can hear you badgering Finn about how it was to hold that in your hands, you’ve got to reconsider.”

“But maybe turn that blade off,” Finn added with a nervous laugh.

Which Poe did in a hurry: and now he could turn the lightsaber over and around in his hands, feeling the residual warmth of crystal and plasma through the hilt. “It’s -- it’s not what I thought.”

“You thought it would be heavy?”

“It’s -- small. For a weapon that could do so much. That’s already done so much.” A chill ran down his spine, remembering the exact provenance of this blade, of its _bearers_. 

“And that is probably one of the reasons why the Jedi don’t -- don’t hand their weapons down, why we have to make our own,” Rey said. 

And then the yellow haloing her face, her eyes, vanished. A lightsaber pike, lying quiescent across the palm of her hand.

“I’m tired,” she said, quietly.

“What do I do with this?” Poe asked, staring at the lightsaber in his own hand.

“Hold on to it for me.”


	10. secret garden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another TFA prompt from a friend. This one comes from dear [CyanideBreathmint](http://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint).

The breeze that blows across the tarmac is crisp and bracing, and it brings her the scents of engines and oil and grease, the stray waft of salt-scented air from the nearby inland sea, and Rey tucks her blanket more firmly around her shoulders, takes another long sip from the oversized, lopsided cup sitting on the crate with her.

The planet that they’re currently sheltering on is somewhere on the nebulous borders between the Outer Rim and Wild Space, and they’re somewhere just south of the planetary equator, and as she tries to wake up beneath the protective shelter of the _Millennium Falcon_ the beings on the landing pads run for cover.

She blinks, and the breeze blows gusts of warm wetness against the toes of her boots, and -- oh. It’s raining, again. She’s still not used to rain, despite six weeks and counting, despite swift-rolling thunderstorms intruding on her meditations, despite waking from dreams to the sudden rumbling drone of raindrops against the windows of the little house she’s been assigned as accommodation. 

Now she edges the tip of her boot just out of shelter, and slouches protectively over her caf, and the tarmac empties of even the hardiest droids as the rain intensifies and now she can’t actually see the series of rolling hills in which this section of the base is nestled, as if tucked into some kind of overlooked niche on this particular continent.

Rolling hills overlooking an inland sea, and active storm fronts coming in from all sides, and with the rain comes an overwhelming brightness of shades of green -- where she’d thought Takodana to be nothing but leaves and forest and the lonely towering majesty of old old trees, this planet -- its designation an odd combination of repeating numbers -- is positively covered in grass. Shrubs and bushes, some of them with hardy tenacious roots that clung even to the sand-scratched shores; and sometimes when she skims the _Falcon_ over the sea she imagines that there might even be gardens beneath the water, plants that lived _beneath_ the surface.

A shrill greeting, coming closer, growing in pitch and volume: and she looks up and smiles, and R2-D2 seems no worse for its waterlogged trip through newly-formed puddles and the runoff from all kinds of starfighter wings and noses. 

“All alone?” she asks, and she throws a drying cloth over its rounded dome, and carefully wipes water away from its optic sensor. 

The droid lets out a placid trill that sounds half-amused.

“A cold?” she laughs. “He’s prone to colds?”

An indignant snort. 

“You can’t really expect him -- or me, for that matter -- to stop, ah, _gawping_ at rain falling from the skies.”

R2 bleats out a rude word.

That only makes her laugh harder -- and then R2 seems to start, and it rolls closer and pops open a compartment on its midsection. 

“Oh, what is this?” Carefully she reaches in with caf-warmed, rain-chilled fingers, and extracts -- 

Such a brave bright show of a flower. Each petal is a swarm of colors: golden yellow on the outer edges, and inside that border a vibrant orange that makes her think of flight, deepening to a dark, dark red as it disappears into the center. A ruffled mass, half a globe of flowering extravagance, small enough to sit completely in the palm of her hand.

R2 chitters an explanation and then rolls off into the _Falcon_ , and Rey stares, transfixed, into the heart of the flower for a moment longer -- before she leaps to her feet and leaves her caf behind, running reckless and heedless into the rain, her hands curled protectively around her floral gift.

Tucked away in a corner of her home on this planet is a sheaf of flimsis, the material rough-hewn and ragged around the edges. Pages upon pages, carefully bound into a sort of book, and colors on each page: the colors of the flowers that she collects and carefully presses, and the colors of the pens that she’d used to mark each page, her own cramped letters stuck into the corners and the little free spaces that the flowers left her.

Here is a brittle page. A long-dried flower with six jagged-edged petals, one of the first flowers she had ever seen, a lucky find in the sandbound wilds of Jakku, struggling to grow in the harsh sun: but grow it had, enough to put out handfuls of flowers, enough that she hadn’t felt bad for taking just one for herself, something she could remember that distant day by. The flower is a drab, brownish yellow, certainly nothing compared to the riotous blossom she’s holding now, but it’s precious all the same, a keepsake of an unexpected find.

She turns to another page at random. Thirty slender petals, blue borders on white centers, and a golden center that -- according to the holonets -- was actually a dense cluster of the real flowers. Tiny, tiny golden stars, five points on each, and the blue petals were window dressing, a means to lure in that plant’s natural propagators and pollinators. 

Finn’s name in the corner: the blue petals and the golden starburst of little flowers had been a gift from him, something he’d stumbled across on a recon mission, something he’d carried across the parsecs just for her.

And on the next page, a contribution from Poe and Kes Dameron: a stately, cup-shaped bloom that took up nearly the entire flimsi, its white petals speckled with pale pink. Her own notes repeated what they’d told her: the species had been transplanted to Yavin 4 from somewhere in the Inner Rim. An infusion made from the leaves could soothe muscle pains. Poe had grown up with a box of those flowers just outside his window.

A bright red rose on another page, the first rose Rey had ever seen, but according to Jessika Pava those flowers were popular nearly all over the galaxy; and then a dozen heart-shaped blossoms, purple shading to nearly black in the centers, small and delicate and a species from long-lost Alderaan, that had been encouraged to grow on the few worlds where that planet’s survivors had settled.

On the last occupied page there are no flowers. Instead there is a graceful spray of long pointed leaves, together with a thin stalk that held hundreds of tiny, tiny seeds. Again she thinks of Takodana, and of Maz Kanata, who somehow managed to send her something from the ruins of her cantina, “a better symbol of hope.” Rey had copied that message onto the page.

Now she’d be able to add a page to her collection, her little sheaf of treasures, but first: pressing the flower to preserve its rich colors. What a bright flame it was, she thinks, and she almost, almost hesitates before hiding it away, pressed flat onto its side between two pieces of linen and then a stack of heavy crates filled with odds and ends of engine bits and pieces.

She makes a note to herself for the afternoon training session: she’ll bring her Master an extra pastry from the mess halls.


	11. a breath of rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspiration taken from a tweet by lovely [Blackbird_Singing](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackbird_Singing).

Sometimes he dreams of the smell of rain.

The smell of the soil of Yavin 4 as it exhaled in the quiet drip-drip-dripping moments after a swift squall: shredded leaf and fallen flower and the rills flowing down the sides of mottled-gray rocks. Earthy and rich and ripe, with -- sometimes -- the lingering sharp edges of ozone, and the resinous itch of tree sap, the squashed remnants of overripe fruit and burst-open seed pods.

He can still remember, with a gentle lingering ache that has never really left him despite the years and the tears, the first time he ever ventured out into the rain. 

The burr of recirculated air and the rasp of responding to battle-heated cries: these things were what made his mother’s voice so sweet, so well-remembered, and he remembers how she’d shown him the rain. A rare moment when she was there, just on the cusp of running back towards the fight that raged across the stars: but she was still wearing her bandages, but she was still waking up feverish and teary-eyed, and he’d clung to her with chubby hands, crying because he wanted her to feel better, to not be so sad -- 

But -- she’d been there with him, she’d been smiling, that day.

“Look, Poe,” and she’d called him her darling and her brave-hearted boy. “Look, it’s raining, and you can’t see the wind but you can see how the trees dance.”

“Smells funny,” he thinks he might have said. His first reaction to the smell of rain has always been a deep breath, a startled frown. It’s so unexpected, and it changes on almost every world where he’s smelled it, and he’s gone long stretches without it.

“It’s the ground beneath our feet, breathing out like we do,” Shara Bey had murmured. She’d demonstrated by breathing warm air onto the palm of his hand. 

“The ground? It’s like us?”

“It breathes out, yes, and this is what it smells like. This is the smell of the leaves that have fallen and the fruit that didn’t get eaten, the smell of the rocks and the smell of what lives beneath the ground.”

He’d tried to pull away from her, then. “I want to feel the rain.” He thinks he might have even climbed down from his perch against her hip. Climbed down, or tried to: because he’d wanted to run outside but he’d also wanted to cling to his mother, to cling to her scent and to the strands of her helmet-squashed hair. 

She’d kissed him, and put him gently down, and let him scramble out into the downpour: and how she’d laughed when he had screeched: “Cold rain cold cold cold!”

She’d held him close and dried his hair in a towel and put him in fresh dry clothes after he came back in. She’d gently brushed the mud away from his bare feet and his round knees. She’d shared a cup of warm tea with him, with a spoonful of extra sweetener.

Now Poe wakes up with the smell of rain wrapped around his shoulders and -- he’s in his quarters and it’s far too early to get up.

But he scrubs the sleep and the grateful tears away from his eyes and he throws on the same flight suit from the previous day’s drills. It’s due for the wash and no one will mind if it gets waterlogged and muddy, as long as he remembers to put it into the right machine.

From its charging station, BB-8 trills a reminder at him.

“I don’t need shoes, not for this,” and he slouches out the door, out the nearest exit.

The trees in this place have gray-green leaves and no fruit, and the soil beneath his feet is powdery rust-red, and this is no squall that he’s stepping out into: it’s a real torrent, and the raindrops crash against his skin almost hard enough to hurt, and soon he’s soaked and shivering and he’s still taking in deep gulps of cold air, and the smell of rain invades his senses. He can almost taste it. He can almost think that he’ll be washed away, pounded down to limp torn bits, and maybe if he’s lucky, he’ll get to see her again, feel the cold rain that fell into her outstretched hands, be wrapped in her arms again.

Poe tips his head back, just a little, and the rain tastes like rust. Like old dried blood.

He hates the taste of his own blood drying on his teeth. Too much of a reminder, too powerful a flashback, to the gibbering imprisonment within his own body, to the torment of his comprehensively violated thoughts -- 

He opens his mouth, and screams into the roar of the storm -- he rears up onto the tips of his toes, he cries out in the memory of his pain and his loss and he can’t -- he can’t breathe, with this place breathing out and exhaling at him -- 

Warmth. Two solid presences, flanking him.

“It’s us,” says a voice full of desert-scoured strength.

“We’ve got you,” says a voice that will no longer be obscured by a helmet.

The last of the scream leaves him at last, pulled out on sorrowing barbs, and he sags gratefully against the others. 

“You’ll be fine,” Rey says.

“Do you want to go in?” Finn asks.

No. No. Poe shakes his head and shivers at the same time. He’s none too steady when he reaches for their hands, and he’s grateful when they catch at him, when they prop him up. “Can you -- can you smell that?” he rasps.

“Like the wires in Star Destroyers,” Rey says.

“Like damaged armor,” Finn says.

“Petrichor,” Poe says, and he sounds out the word as he’d done on the day he’d first learned it. Learned it in his mother’s arms, two sets of hands around a single cup.

Now, maybe they’ll learn the word from him, where he’s propped up between them, the two of them holding him together.

The three of them drenching themselves in the rain together.

He hears Rey whispering the word under her breath and he hears Finn inhale and exhale loudly, and he holds their hands tightly.


	12. hello from the other side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know very well that the next part of the trilogy will kill my Rey-is-a-Kenobi theory stone-cold dead. I'm still going to write it :)

_Consider the Force. It flows around us. It binds us. It links living beings to each other, and at the same time it links the living to those who have gone, and to those things that are not alive._

A different voice whispering to her, wise and gentle and -- old, Rey thinks. The years of war and the years of exile have aged Luke Skywalker, but he’s not like this, he doesn’t feel like a tender warmth that settles very carefully around her shoulders. 

A voice she’s heard once, in the tumult of Finn leaving her to run to the Outer Rim, as far away from the First Order as he could get: a voice bound to the weight of a lightsaber, to the nicks and rough spots dotted up and down the hilt.

She keeps her eyes closed and her palms open, though she desperately wants to reach out and find -- what? There must be a being speaking to her, nothing like the disembodied whispers in her memory, the voices of the ones who left her behind -- 

_No, little, I am sorry -- I’m not your father._

“Then tell me who you are,” Rey murmurs.

 _I knew your mother’s father, your grandfather. I was his Master, but I cannot take credit for the ideal that he became._ A quiet, rueful laugh. _Though I have to say, I suppose some of the things I tried to teach him eventually stuck. As stubborn a being as any other, I suppose he had the right of it. I, too, was stubborn._

“Who are you?”

 _Consider the Force,_ that voice says, again, and she sighs and sinks into that ghostly warmth, lets it settle deeper than her skin, lets it flow into her own senses, until she feels a distant tug.

Careful, careful. She reaches for that presence, draws it closer, as gentle as holding on to grains of sand -- 

Deeper, deeper into the Force. It isn’t quite free-fall. It’s like teetering at the top of a towering dune, with a sturdy sand-sledge beneath her; it’s falling carefully forward into rapid motion.

The sensation of a hand clasping hers.

_That’s it, little. Open your eyes._

An outline of shivering shimmering blue. Long hair tied back neatly, a kindly face, and, oddly, the same clothes she often saw on other scavengers on Jakku. Sand-colored material, a short cloak that fell to the being’s knees and concealed everything except his boots. 

“Hello,” Rey whispers, and she’s alone on the _Millennium Falcon_ because Chewbacca is staying with the General. She’s alone, and there’s no need to speak softly, but -- there are other presences on this ship. It would be rude to disturb them.

 _Pleased to meet you. I am Qui-Gon Jinn._

“Did you spend time in the desert? You’re -- you’re dressed like me,” Rey says, quietly.

_I’ve been to a few deserts. But I was born in a city, a city that grew until it took over an entire planet. Coruscant. Have you traveled there?_

She shakes her head.

 _I understand it would be a dangerous place for one such as you at this time, little._

“My name is Rey,” she says. “And I’m not _little_.”

 _Ah. My apologies. You are a padawan, are you not? And there is only one Master alive at this time. You are Luke Skywalker’s student._ As she watches, he seems to gather his cloak around himself. _Might I sit?_

Rey nods, and slides over to the side to make room. There’s just enough space in her bunk for the two of them to fit, and it’s strange, because she can see the creases in the bedding but she can’t feel the weight of the being sitting calmly next to her.

_He is afraid, and he is -- in his way -- also determined. He knows what he needs to do; he is only held back by his past. I do not wish to make light of that past. But -- he needs to let go. He needs to move forward._

“I’m not the chance he’s looking for,” Rey says, quietly. 

_See it from a different perspective,_ Qui-Gon Jinn says. _As the Force is ever-flowing, so must we, its dedicated ones, examine ourselves constantly. We must adapt. Find the balance for every moment. So he must move forward, and so must you, under his tutelage._

“Find the balance. But what if it isn’t in me? What if the balance I want is in others?” 

She gets a quiet chuckle in response. _You have already determined it so, it seems. And -- I cannot gainsay you. I do not live your life, I do not know your past, I do not understand your needs. Still: there is the Code. It worked for many of us._

“Did it work for you?” 

More laughter. _Your grandfather would know this from very, very personal experience: not always._

“My grandfather,” Rey says, wonderingly. She thinks back to reading about the Old Republic, to reading about the Jedi. This being’s name. 

_You are Obi-Wan Kenobi’s granddaughter,_ Qui-Gon Jinn says. _You are as strong in the Force as he ever was. And for you to be alive requires him to turn away from the Code, as I did when I needed to._

“So I was a mistake.”

 _Never._

She nearly recoils at the quiet strength of the word. 

Again that tender warmth on her shoulders. _Obi-Wan cherished his beloved and his daughter, and had he lived to meet you he would have cherished you as well._

“So why was I left behind?” She should be angry, she should be shouting -- but she wants Finn and Poe by her side, and that’s all, and they are out on a series of recon missions and she desperately, desperately misses them. She wants to reach out to them -- she touches the palm of her hand to the cold bulkheads of the _Falcon_ and strains toward them.

And she spins dizzily through space, she careens down hyperspace lanes. Slipping through her fingers is the feeling of silver-streaked curls and the texture of a many-times-mended jacket. She can almost hear the familiar beeping of an astromech droid, the whirring blur of orange trim on the move -- 

She crashes back into herself. Still in her bunk. The _Falcon_ ’s walls close around her but they do not confine her. The presence next to her, kind and -- she knows she’s not supposed to feel _pride_ but she wants to laugh because he looks like he’s just been trod upon by a happabore.

 _This is not a situation that I am familiar with,_ Qui-Gon Jinn says, eventually. _Therefore I will not presume to give you advice. I should want to learn from you, were I more than a lingering image in the Force._

“My -- my grandfather,” Rey says, after a moment. “Can he do what you’re doing now?”

 _I think that with time he will come to you._

“You mean you’ll make him appear to me.”

That gets her a brief smile. Startling to see such an impish expression on such a venerable face.

Even after he fades gently away she still remembers that smile.


	13. you are not alone

There’s a soft wheezing sound in the cockpit of _Black One_ that he thinks really isn’t him: because he can feel the unsteady rise and fall of his own chest, because he can hear the sounds he’s making as he tries to breathe through his own many-times-battered ribs, and he winces as he takes in another scratchy lungful of refiltered air.

Faint green light next to his left hand: a few hours of oxygen left, no more. Half the displays and readouts have gone dark. He has to imagine that he can hear BB-8 as it chirps to itself in the silence of intersystem space, as it works to bring what’s left of the X-wing back online, because the screen that would normally display its communications is as black as their surroundings, as lifeless.

Poe Dameron takes a breath, and another, and he can’t make his hands uncurl from where they’re gripping the immobile control sticks and levers: because if he lets go he’ll start shaking all over.

The others are safe. He thinks. His throat still hurts from yelling orders at his long-escaped squadron. Fleeing back to base with a stolen freighter and a handful of agents that they’d just barely rescued from the First Order. Beings with important tactical and strategic information: and in the heat of pursuit and the dogfight he had judged their safety to be more critical to success than his own.

So: he’d screamed at the others and gone into a desperate series of decoying manoeuvres, and he’d only gotten one of his engines shot to flaming bits for his troubles. No hyperdrive. Minimal life-support. A little water tucked away in an extra canteen -- when had he put it onboard? He couldn’t for the life of him remember. 

When he tries to turn his head the skin of his throat catches against the blood-ragged edge of his flight suit, pulling uncomfortably.

“Kriff,” he says, at last, and he bows his head, and thinks of homing beacons: there’s one hidden away in the labyrinthine circuitry of _Black One_. There’s another in one of his dog tags. He wears several of those, only two of them inscribed with his own name and details: because he also carries his mother’s tags around with him, and one of his father’s. 

Raised letters on palm-sized oblong tags: and he thinks about helping Rey and Finn through the bureaucracy of the Resistance -- nothing as convoluted as it had been in the New Republic, but still a bureaucracy. Half-empty database entries, blank spaces for family members but several names listed under _next of kin_.

It makes Poe smile, a little, though the left side of his face hurts, to think of the General as next of kin for Rey and Finn both. It hadn’t even been her idea -- but he remembers her quiet decisive nod. He remembers the pinched grateful lines around the corners of Rey’s eyes and the heartfelt salute that Finn had given her.

Pain, now, chewing more loudly on his strained nerves, and he winces and tries to get comfortable, but there’s no space for that in the cockpit.

He would have wanted to see them wearing their dog tags, he would have wanted to keep flying with them -- but it’s getting darker and darker, and he can’t help but cringe away: because the dark is bleeding red around the edges, bleeding --

No, no, he can’t think of that, he can -- he can distract himself. He can take another breath. He closes his eyes and thinks of Rey, dancing through a series of combat forms. He tries to calm his racing heart and thinks of Finn, trying earnestly to understand Binary.

He grits his teeth and thinks of holding their hands, and he’s so tired.

The entire galaxy lurches around him and he blearily opens his eyes, and the ship bearing down upon him is -- well, at least he’s pretty sure it’s not from the First Order. Blurry impressions, the X-wing moving but not under its own power, and -- funny, that, BB-8 isn’t objecting.

Pop and hiss of airlocks and hatches and -- warmth around his wrists, gentle fingertips on his skin.

Clink of dangling dog tags from nearby. Poe catches a glimpse of his own name.

Hands, holding his.


	14. tenuous connections

He thinks he’s gotten to the point where he’ll know -- he’ll just _know_. Know that he won’t be able to sleep through the night. Know that he’ll be clenching his hands into fists for hours on end. Know that his face will be sore in the morning because he’ll be gritting his teeth, trapping the screams trying to claw their way out of his throat. Know that no number of starfighter manual pages will bore him enough to let him rest.

So on those nights he just doesn’t go to bed at all. 

Sometimes the late-shift Signal Officer will find Poe Dameron one console over in the command center, weary and paling and shaking as he scans the incoming and outgoing comm channels. 

Sometimes the late-shift medical droids will look up to catch a glimpse of Poe Dameron looking in on some unconscious soldier or pilot or support crew, sleeping a healing sleep upon thin mattresses.

Sometimes the late-shift beings staffing the mess hall will look up from scrubbing the floors and peeling the vegetables and brewing the next morning’s caf to find Poe Dameron hunched over a several-hours-old cup of something in the corner next to the stacks of steam-cleaned trays.

After Kylo Ren the late nights come more and more frequently, and he takes to haunting the corridors, walking and walking and still trapped beneath his skin and bones. Screams fighting to get free of his fraying nerves. 

It’s been two months since Starkiller. Two months of weary faithful late shifts by an unmoving Finn’s side. Two months of lying sleepless and awake in his own bunk while BB-8 whistles and beeps mournfully at him, coaxing him into a rest that he can’t find, and he doesn’t have the heart to tell his buddy off because it might only be a droid but it worries for him, and it’s got every right to do that.

He’s in the medical wing and he’s picking at a bowl of cold stew, and every time he puts a spoonful into his mouth he immediately wants to spit it back out -- but he chokes the sauce and the tubers and the meat down and is even more reluctant to pick the spoon up again and he needs to, to move. To get away.

Too late to comm Yavin 4. His father is sleeping.

“Sorry,” Poe manages to say to Finn -- all he gets is the beep of the life-support monitors -- and Poe bolts out into the corridor, turns corners and shoulders through doors and suddenly he’s looking helplessly at _Black One_. All tuned up and repainted and sleek, completely remade and better than new. 

He made _Black One_ better, minute after minute in those long nights, and he can’t make himself better.

Even the cockpit of the X-wing offers him no relief: the chair is perfectly molded and shaped for him and he’s more than learned how to get comfortable when he’s hemmed in by control sticks and dormant sensors and warning lights, and he can’t make the mad gibbering whirl of fear in his head _stop stop stop just for a moment --_

He digs the heels of his hands into his prickling eyes and desperately wishes for the relief of tears, and he really seriously considers the idea of stealing a bottle of Corellian whiskey from the General’s private stores and the next thing he knows, someone is whispering to him.

_Poe. Poe Dameron._

No, no, not this again, not the voice in his head again, not that red-tinged violation again -- 

_Hey, sorry, it’s me. It’s -- Rey. I’m Rey._

Rey? 

How is he hearing her voice when he doesn’t even know where in the galaxy that completed map leads?

_It’s me. It’s really me. I’m sitting next to the ocean. Can you hear the waves?_

Poe clenches his hands into fists and labors for his next breath and -- suddenly tastes salt on his lips and a constant breeze cooling the sweat at his temples. 

Real. He’s in _Black One_ on a Resistance base and there are no oceans nearby, but he takes a deep breath and smells saltwater wind, and clinging vines, and wave-washed rocks. “Rey,” he mutters. “I’m -- I’m not losing my mind?”

_No. I promise you’re not. It’s me, it’s just me. I’m supposed to be meditating, but -- but I heard you._

“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbles.

_Don’t be. You need help._

She’s blunt and kind and he’s so, so grateful he could weep. “Yes.”

_Are you comfortable? Are you warm? Have you eaten?_

“No, yes, and I think.”

He gets the sense of a sigh, a gentle pressure on his wrist: and he can’t see a thing but he could swear that she’s just touched him right now, traced a circle just below the palm of his hand.

_Close your eyes. Listen. Hear the sound of the waves with me._

He does.

He can hear her controlled breathing, the way she counts the moments of inhaling and the moments of exhaling, and he finds himself following along.

The last thing he hears is -- _Sleep, Poe, it’s going to be all right,_ and it’s not a command. Just a tender suggestion and the touch of rough fingertips. 

Poe sleeps.

(In the morning, BB-8 wakes him up with a fanfare: _Finn is asking for you!_ )


	15. all you need is takedown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blame this one on a non-standard fight music sequence of the Libertango by Astor Piazzolla and "The Fourth Avenue Cafe" by L'Arc~en~Ciel.

Poe Dameron knows frissons, he knows the charge of electrical emotion that shivers and rasps down his nerves, and he knows that these things are both very welcome and never enough in the uncertain life of a freedom fighter: these are the feelings that push him into wilder and wilder maneuvers, these are the feelings that make him come up with insane plans, and he knows the frisson that slashes him to the quick when he first observes Rey in a practice match.

Bare hands, and dark strands loosed from the three loops and the nearly invisible braid of her hair, and that sharp watching _stillness_ in her eyes.

And he remembers Finn talking quietly with his hands, trying to convey the impossible weightlessness of the _Millennium Falcon_ in a deliberate stall leading into a _backflip_ , and -- yeah, he knows this in his guts now, he’s looking at the woman who did that in one of the galaxy’s most celebrated ships. By herself. When she didn’t even know what the ship was.

The rest of the stories make far more sense, now.

Testor circling on the edges of the mats, playing referee for this sparring round: Poe watches her size up Rey and Connix and then nod, sharply. “Three falls out of five -- on my mark -- _mark!_ ”

His heart lurches, thrills, as Rey side-steps Connix and rolls forward to seize her ankles, as Rey yanks Connix down and -- to shivering gasps -- is suddenly kicked away. Bare feet to Rey’s collar bones. 

Rey’s smile is sharper than vibroblades and her hands move again, shooting for the pressure points in Connix’s wrist and shoulder and Poe grins as Connix hits the mats back-first. 

Circling, circling, two women moving very much like starfighters in Poe’s imagination: he notes the slash of Connix’s feints, the speed at which she throws a punch, but he’s more focused on Rey’s steady advance, the rolling-roaring-avalanche inevitability of the second takedown.

Encouraging cries from some of the command center staff as Connix gets back one of her own -- Rey isn’t quite fast enough to dodge the armbar choke.

A hand sliding into his, a high inquisitive whistle at his feet, and he squeezes Finn’s fingers gently and keeps his eyes focused on the match: where Rey is now standing still at one end of the mats, eyes closed. Her hands: the right one pulled back and loaded into the waiting possibility of a punch, and the left one held steadily forward with her first two fingers in a V-sign.

“Does she mean to try and poke Connix’s eyes out? Is that even legal?” one of the other pilots whispers to her companions.

Beside Poe, Finn shakes his head.

“Talk to me,” Poe murmurs.

“Soresu,” and all it takes is one word and Poe can _smell_ the ferrous crackle of an ignited lightsaber. “She’s more interested in the other form, though, the one with all the attacks, Skywalker calls it Djem So.” When he pauses Poe raises an eyebrow at him. “Darth Vader practiced that form.”

Poe winces despite himself.

“Yeah.”

On the mats Connix has thrown herself forward, lunging with one shoulder forward, aiming squarely for Rey’s torso -- and Rey flings herself into a mighty upward leap.

Gasps from Finn and the others, and Poe grins till the muscles in his cheeks hurt, because you go up that high without a starfighter or a ship strapped to your back, you have to come _down_ sometime -- 

And Rey does, in a crouch that pins Connix neatly to the mats.

“Three! Match to Rey!” Testor shouts, and there’s murmuring and applause and good-natured catcalling everywhere, and for some reason the pilots from earlier turn and give both Poe and Finn enthusiastic thumbs-up gestures -- 

Rey hauls Connix to her feet and they embrace, warm and brief, and then Poe catches his breath: because here comes Rey, stalking across the mats to them, strength crackling coiling in the lines of her.

“So _awesome_ ,” thunderstruck and quiet, Finn’s cheeks darkening with the same admiring flush that is heating up Poe’s ears.

“Rey,” he hears himself say, and the hand that he holds out to her shivers with his feelings, which are nameless and electric and bright.


	16. must have called a thousand times

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a direct sequel to [hello from the other side](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5493311/chapters/13982392).

Blue, just at the edge of her vision.

Not the same blue as the softly fringed flowers on their delicate climbing vine. Spiral green looping and twining about a makeshift X-shape of old starfighter struts and parts and color-fraying cables. Not the same blue as the gloves that she wears on her hands at Poe’s insistence, because he knows the need to get into the rich soil and touch the slick little wriggling bodies of grubs and worms but he also knows about the acidic components of the planet itself. Some of the beings on the base have to wear rebreather masks just to cross from one building to the other: acid in the air and acid in the soil, and he doesn’t want Rey to get her hands burned and blistered.

The blue at the edge of her vision makes her feel like wistful wishes scoured away by whistling sand, and she thinks her heart aches with sympathy, and she turns her head to look: but the blue presence eludes her. Translucent panels trussed and bolted together. Finn had told her about the name for a place like this: it’s a greenhouse, a protected environment for plants. Near the doors there are orderly, neat plots for fruits and vegetables; here, near the back of the structure, live the ornamental things, and she had been at a loss to understand why the whole space hadn’t been devoted to growing food.

She knows about flowers and the pollination process and petals falling away to reveal tiny fruits, tiny things that could grow, and become ingredients in bread and stew and many other things.

A grave, gentle explanation from Leia, talking about the purely ornamental plants propped up in their trellises and rickety frameworks: “Flowers mean that plants reproduce, you know that: but flowers also mean that minds are refreshed. They give off scents that bring our memories back to us. They bloom and the colors catch our eyes.”

“I remember a little yellow flower that I only saw twice, maybe three times, in the Jakku deserts,” Rey had replied, nodding her understanding. 

Now she meditates on the shapes of those little yellow flowers, and again she catches a glimpse of blue at the edges of her vision.

A fallen flower, near her boot, and she stoops. She carefully brushes the acid-reek of the soil from its stained petals. A glowing white in her hand, a dozen pointed petals, and she stays on her haunches. She offers the flower over her shoulder without looking. “Master Qui-Gon. I know you’re there.”

She expects him to say, _Good work, Rey._

She expects him to say, _I came to see how your garden was doing. Places like these hum with the Force._

She expects him to say, _What would you like to talk about today?_

She’s not expecting the actual voice that speaks to her, nor the sudden hook of faint familiar recognition that snags at her breastbone and makes her gasp: “Rey.”

She leaps to her feet and the flower falls back into the soil. 

The presence before her, tinged in blue around the edges. A craggy face at once young and old. He could almost have been Luke Skywalker if not for the height, if not for the nose, if not for the tears in his eyes. 

Real tears, on a man who is almost real.

“You’re not -- ” she begins, and when the man shakes his head, takes a half-step forward, she pulls back. She reaches for her staff --

“Rey,” the man says again. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m sorry.” He turns away, he starts to fade -- 

And she catches her breath on another name. Its syllables sticking in her throat together with the questions that neither Master Qui-Gon nor Luke can ever really answer. 

A name, and a title.

And she wants to reach out, wants to run away, and all she says is, “Grandfather.”

With his back still turned to her, she can see the weight that bows his shoulders. “Maybe don’t call me that,” he says, “because I don’t think I deserve it.”

Questions crowding on her tongue, clamoring just behind her teeth. 

She lunges forward and catches the man’s hand. Rough skin beneath her fingertips, that’s something they might have in common. “Master Obi-Wan,” she says.

“No. Not that either. And you will not call me by the name that frightens you. Don’t call me _Ben_. Call me _Kenobi_ instead.”

“Master Kenobi,” Rey says.

A sigh. “That will do.” And: “Rey. Granddaughter.” 

She’s about to reach for him again when he adds one more word that sends her almost to her knees.

“Dearest.”

The greenhouse and its colors dissolve into the wash of her tears, the greens and the whites and the reds running together, and the harsh planes in her visitor’s face. 

“There aren’t enough words in the languages of the galaxy to tell you, Rey, that I wish I’d been there for you.”

“Are you going to leave me again?” And Rey covers her face with her hands, and sobs.

“No. No, I won’t. I’ll be here, so long as you’re willing to tolerate my presence.” Again Kenobi bows his head -- but this time he draws closer. This time he touches her shoulder. 

She turns her face into his chest, and weeps.


	17. breath by breath, step by step

He groans -- but he groans very quietly -- when he opens his eyes and catches a glimpse of the reflections of red numbers.

It’s too early. He’s only just fallen asleep. It’s several hours to the first of the sunrises. Three sunrises herald the beginning of the daytime cycle on this planet. Does he have to wait that long to get out of bed?

Wait, no, scratch that. The bed’s only got him in it tonight. Three bunks bolted and lashed together. The extra blankets are for Rey in case her feet grow cold while she sleeps. There is exactly one extra pillow and it smells of the star-shaped fruit that Poe occasionally sneaks from the mess halls for a midnight snack.

On Finn’s side of the bed there is one blanket, and there is one pillow, and one many-times-repaired jacket.

Finn tries to hold his yawn back and fails, and he’s facing a choice and he feels weary already.

What to do while he’s awake and the others aren’t here to keep him in bed?

Choices. Life is full of choices when he’s more familiar with a life _without_. 

He could get up -- and then what? While the Resistance tries to make sure that its members follow their accustomed waking/sleeping cycles, it is also a round-the-chrono operation. Some of the staff stay up at the command post to continuously monitor the galaxy and the rest of their scattered flock. Some of the base personnel use regular sleeping hours to conduct more complicated maintenance on the handful of remaining spaceflight-worthy vessels. 

He thinks about the other parts of the base that might still be accessible: the shooting ranges, the smallest of the three mess halls, the ready room for the pilots going out on their usual patrols.

No schedule to follow, and no suggestions from people he trusts, and Finn groans as he sits up in the bed and puts his head in his hands.

Everything’s a choice, here, and making choices can be so exhausting.

What does he want?

If Rey and Luke hadn’t gone out on a mission to secure a source of lightsaber crystals, he’d probably have asked if she could hold his hand.

If Poe hadn’t been running a reconnaissance mission in the general vicinity of Dantooine, he’d probably have asked if they could watch some kind of holo.

But he’s alone, and he only has himself to rely on right now, and he’d really rather the others were here -- he’d even settle for some kind of errand. Orders from the General or someone else in the chain of command. He’d go, willingly.

A very soft _whoopwhoo_ from outside the door.

He gets up and the floor beneath his feet is cold -- and so is BB-8 when it rolls in, when it runs right up to the edge of the bed and hangs its little headpiece.

“You miss them, too,” Finn whispers, and he sits down on the floor, and puts his arm partly on the unmade bed and partly around the roundness of the droid’s body. 

He gets a mournful whistle for an answer. 

“Sometimes I don’t know what I’d do when they’re not here.” He’s talking to a droid. This is now a recurring part of his life. “I don’t miss the First Order, I can’t and I wouldn’t, but when I was there -- I always knew what I had to do, and when I had to do it.”

Encouraging beep. 

“Life was divided into neat little segments, you know? Sleep the required number of hours. Put on armor. Pick up needed tools. Head to designated work area.” His throat itches. “Okay, maybe I don’t miss the constant terror and all the monitoring and all those faces that I couldn’t see. But still. I got really used to living a very regimented life. Living out here, it’s sort of the complete opposite of that.”

Inquisitive snort.

“I’m going to take a guess, I didn’t understand half of that. But you said I could ask for a schedule?”

BB-8 nods its little headpiece vigorously, and beeps some more.

“You’re not wrong with the whole bit about the soldiers.” Poe being the stellar example, Finn thinks. 

“Maybe I’ll talk to the others about this, when I see them again.”

And then the droid makes a sound that he interprets as _Rey_.

“Do you think she had to have some kind of schedule, too, back on Jakku?”

More nodding.

“I keep forgetting you spent a day or something with her.”

Disapproving sounds.

“I don’t like that planet either. Let’s try to never go back there,” and Finn pats BB-8’s head, and gives it a thumbs-up.

He sits in the dark with the droid until it beeps at him that one of the other mess halls has started to serve breakfast.

That makes him smile, a little. He likes the food in the Resistance. Most of it. He’s learned to avoid some of the things that are explicitly _not_ for human consumption.

Breakfast will be another set of choices to make, but at least he’ll get food out of it. 

He gets to his feet, he gets into his clothes, he starts a new day.


	18. bread and warmth

Rey and Finn are in Poe’s kitchen at the crack of dawn -- and this is because he asked them to be there -- and there are strands of hair falling out of Rey’s haphazard braid. There are sleep-creases visible on the slightly paler underside of Finn’s forearm. They look half-thrown out of their bunks and Poe can’t help but kiss them both -- morning breath be cursed.

Rey sighs and puts her forehead down on the table.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Finn implores.

“If you sleep on my kitchen counter, no bread today,” Poe says, teasingly.

“I don’t know what I want,” Rey mumbles. “Do I want sleep or do I want bread. Both of them sound good.”

“Compromise,” Poe offers after a moment. “Help me with this. I’ll bake the bread, and then after we’re done with breakfast we’re napping.”

“Nap in the middle of the day?”

“It’s a rest day,” Poe says, shrugging, though he knows she can’t see him. “We all do whatever we want on rest days, that’s what they’re for.”

“I’m still supposed to -- meditate or something,” Rey says.

“No, you’re not,” Finn says. “I was there, remember? Skywalker says, meditate if you can. It’s not a requirement.”

Poe gives Finn a thumbs-up.

Rey yawns and props her chin on her hand. “All right. Bread.”

“Glad you came around,” Poe says with a grin, and he passes her a pair of canisters. “Give them a sniff for me. The contents should smell sweet -- if they don’t, I’m gonna have words with the mess hall.”

“This one’s gray powder, and this one’s seeds,” Rey reports after prying the lids off. “They do smell really nice, though. Like warm things. Like that black fuel you burn at the outdoor parties, when you’re cooking.”

“Charcoal’s different from planet to planet, from system to system,” Poe says, laughing softly. “I never thought to compare the smell of charcoal to the smell of flour, or mixed seeds, though. Still, if it’s not spoiled, it needs using. Give.”

The canisters are derailed, for a moment, when Finn takes a deep breath -- but soon enough they’re back on Poe’s side of the counter.

He takes a large bowl out of the cramped cupboard. There is water heating in a vessel next to the stove. Several scoops of mixed seeds meet a steady stream of water that’s just come off the boil. Shortening, sweetener, yeast, and then it’s time to blend in the flour. A soft sticky mass studded with the tiny edges of the seeds.

“Now it’s called dough,” Poe says, and he carefully works the mass with his fingertips, with the heel of his hand. He’s used to the rough scratch of the seeds against his skin. Gradually the mass comes together, gradually it becomes smooth and silky and he no longer needs to dust the counter with extra flour -- but he does need to dust his loaf pans. 

“Before I divide it, here,” and he takes a surprised Finn’s hand, and makes him poke a finger right into the center of the ball of dough.

“It’s -- I didn’t expect it to become warm,” Finn laughs. “But -- you’ve been handling it. Of course it would get that way. I’m really not used to preparing food.”

“More KP duty?” Rey says, teasingly.

“And then you’d have to eat rations. I can’t see myself as someone who can cook.”

Poe rolls his eyes fondly. “You know, I didn’t want to cook when I was a kid. I changed my mind.”

“Maybe I will,” Finn says, though he now looks intrigued. “Maybe not. It’s up to me, right?”

“It’s totally your choice.”

Rey pokes the dough with three fingers when he glances at her, and he delights in her warm, startled smile.

He divides the dough between two pans, and sprinkles another kind of seed on top, and then the pans go into the oven.

There’s a squeal from the door, and Poe grins and goes over to open it: and in come BB-8 and one of the mess hall droids. “You requested soup,” the droid says in a chorus of whirs and clicks. 

“Thanks,” and Poe lifts the pot onto the stove. And: “Good job, buddy, thank you.”

BB-8 chirps happily and zooms out again.

“That droid sure got attached to R2-D2,” Finn says.

Rey just laughs, and says, “BB-8’s got a crush.”

Poe passes the time by kissing the two of them, and putting his arms around them.

He’s almost reluctant to go and deal with the bread when it’s time to take it out of the oven.

But Rey springs to her feet and dishes out the soup, and there are good things to spread on the warm bread, and Finn goes into quiet raptures over the bread, and Poe shovels his soup and can’t stop himself from grinning at them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by this tweet: https://twitter.com/Nigella_Lawson/status/717684552068702212


	19. repairs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by a conversation with CyanideBreathmint.

“You don’t have to stay here,” the assistant says, and she looks mostly humanoid, and Finn tries his hardest not to gawk at the green frills running down from her ears and disappearing into her neat smock, at the greenish veins that stand out on the backs of her hands. “But you’ll have to come in for therapy, for rehabilitation.”

“I -- can you tell me what that means exactly? I’m not very familiar with those terms.” Finn really doesn’t want to fidget. Voices threatening “reconditioning” in the back of his mind.

“Certainly,” the assistant says. “There are muscles in your body that have suffered atrophy as a result of your long convalescence, and you’ll be asked to perform exercises, lift weights, so you can build them back up again. But that will be quite tiring and you will still be required to spend a lot of time sitting still, if you can.”

“Oh,” he says. “Physical rehabilitation. I can do that.”

“That’s not all,” and the doctor -- her name is Kalonia, he can remember that -- comes in, and nods at the assistant -- who nods back, and pats Finn’s shoulder, and whisks the data pads and other instrumentation away. “There is also the matter of your mental rehabilitation.”

He bites at the inside of his cheek. “You’re not going to wipe my memory?”

For a moment she looks angry, and he nearly recoils and apologizes, but then that anger fades into a sad kind of weariness and he _does_ whisper, “Sorry.”

“I am not angry at you. I am angry at the First Order. And -- actually, all things considered, what you will really be facing at this point is -- talking,” Kalonia says, eventually. “Mental rehabilitation, meaning, you should just try to _talk_ to someone.”

“I can tell them everything I know about the First Order.”

“Not that,” is the answer, and that is a surprise. “Although the General will ask you to do that. Different thing from what I’m describing, which is that you may need someone to talk to about the things that are now different in your life. That which frustrates you, or confuses you, or makes you feel like bantha shit.”

He laughs, softly, and she joins in after a moment.

“Ask that pilot. He can probably explain the concept of mental therapy better than I do.” She throws him a hard little smirk. “Stars above know all of the pilots have had their fair share.”

“Why?” he asks, curiosity stirring in his gut when he thinks of Poe.

(Poe is away on an extended intelligence-related mission. That’s all Finn knows, and he understands why he hasn’t been given any other details. He understands need-to-know.)

“They see terrible things, and do terrible things, in the name of this thing we call the Resistance,” Kalonia says, “and sometimes they need to express their emotions and their doubts before it all breaks their spirits into pieces.”

“I -- I’ll ask,” he makes himself say.

“You do that. And maybe pick up a hobby.”

Almost without thinking about it, he finds himself glancing at the limp and now lightsaber-trashed leather jacket draped over the foot of his bed, and he says, “I’d like to borrow a data pad, something with access to the holonets?”

“I’m surprised they haven’t given you one already. I’ll see to it,” and Kalonia shakes his hand and sweeps out the door.

The first few tutorials on repairing leather talk about -- adhesives. He’d go with them, except that he once catches sight of the General wearing a black leather duster with a contrasting line of white stitches running up one sleeve.

(“Snowstorms predicted wherever it is she’s heading,” Jessika Pava explains, when she catches Finn staring.)

He’s not -- exactly the best at repairing the things that he wears, but he’s familiar with the principles, since he’d been expected to at least know how to care for his under-armor blacks. It’s only a matter of finding the right materials to work with a jacket like Poe’s: sturdy waxed thread and heavy-duty needles. He also asks for something to protect against accidental needle-stabs, and is given a package of what he learns are called thimbles.

Sitting for hours is _hard_ , and that’s on top of debriefing with beings like Ackbar and Statura, as well as his rehab and therapy sessions. 

More than once he finds himself crying over the jacket in frustration -- and then reporting those incidents in therapy. “It’s going to take such a long time, because I can’t bear sitting down, and I can’t sit down because of my back, and -- I feel hopeless, sometimes. How can a needle be so heavy? How can it be so hard to sew through leather?”

The therapist has no answers for him -- but hope comes from an unexpected source.

He’s reviewing a short holo-clip of making neat stitches in leather when the data pad chirps and a new message pops onto the screen: _Incoming message._

He blinks, and accepts the message, and: it’s Rey. A message from Rey, a few paragraphs long, and something near the end catches his attention first.

 _How can lifting a rock be so difficult? When you’re doing it for the first time, when you’ve never lifted a rock with the power of your mind before. It’s so frustrating! Luke says it is because I’m distracted. I think I might be, because I think of you, and of Poe, and of BB-8, and the General. Are you all right? They told me you had woken up, and I wish I’d been there to see you. Are they helping you get better? Please take care of yourself. You should do things that will keep you healthy._

There’s more to the message.

But he puts the data pad down and smiles, and says, though there’s no one to hear him: “Thank you, Rey.”

He’s doing things for the first time: recovering from grave physical injury is obviously the biggest thing on his mind. But there’s also everything else. Fixing a jacket for the first time. Working with the Resistance’s leadership for the first time. Expressing his feelings for the first time.

She makes things easier to understand, and he’s grateful.

As for Poe -- Finn understands _having things_ because of Poe. A name and not a numerical designation; a being’s jacket to take the place of armor that makes him faceless and voiceless.

And they are his friends. His first friends. BB-8, too.

The data pad and the jacket can wait until tomorrow; the needles and thread and thimble. His back hurts and he needs to lie down and rest.

Not for the first time, he drifts into sleep thinking of Rey and Poe.


	20. desert winds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Third in the Rey Kenobi series, after [hello from the other side](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5493311/chapters/13982392) and [must have called a thousand times](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5493311/chapters/14467282).

Somewhere on the Resistance base, a wall-mounted chrono display begins to toll its slow steady alarm, and Rey, startled, clenches her hands into fists for a long moment. Grit in the corners of her eyes, sleepless stiffness in her rigid shoulders. 

_Whoopwhoopwhoo_ goes BB-8 at her feet. The droid is perched atop a mobile charging station. Why it’s here with her, she has no idea, and there’s no Poe Dameron on the base for her to send its round rolling orange-outlined contours to.

By the time he gets back from his extended patrols she’ll be on a mission of her own. First of many, as Leia had promised: and her words prickle under Rey’s skin. “Tatooine isn’t safe any more, not for the likes of us. I need someone who knows deserts and knows how to navigate hostile places quietly.” 

These are words of caution, these are words of care, and Rey accepts that responsibility happily. She knows little of other planets, of other systems: but sand and dunes and the myriad predators, she knows them in her bones and in her blood. And the General knows about this, is willing to use her. Rey has no qualms with being her instrument. 

Though it _does_ rankle, just a bit, that she won’t be allowed to take her staff along with her. Blasters only, some very light and very battered body armor, and her own wits. 

Oh, and this ship that she’s standing next to: it’s a sleek single-seater craft, all elongated points and dull gray paint. The cockpit is at the front and the rest of the starfighter flows back from it. Flared wings, turbolaser guns at the ends of the wings, a repeating blaster in its retractable mount in the undercarriage. Enough space for an astromech droid -- she’ll be issued one in a few hours -- 

BB-8 chirps again, and Rey glances at the simulator gear that she’d left behind on its little cart several hours ago, and reaches for the training helmet. She knows how to fly this thing, now, but it can’t hurt to keep practicing -- 

The Force ripples around her, softly flowing along her skin.

“You’re up late,” and the voice is gently chiding, gently worried.

When Master Kenobi puts his hand on her shoulder she leans up into the touch, but she doesn’t look up from the helmet. “I have to fly a mission today.”

“A mission with specific objectives, if it means you have to fly it, when you’re supposed to be training.”

“Luke had objections.” Rey sighs, and turns around, and tries to smile at her grandfather. “And Leia agreed with some of those objections, and asked me to fly the mission anyway.” 

“You look tired, dearest.” Heavy brows furrow into a kind frown.

“Nightmares,” Rey says, shortly. “Sometimes I can sleep when I’m next to Finn. But not all the time.”

Master Kenobi’s mouth purses into a thin tight line. “Would that there was any way I could help you.”

“You’re -- you’re helping me,” she says, after a moment. “You and Master Qui-Gon. Some nights I try to meditate.”

“I’d like to hear about that,” Master Kenobi says, and she sits down on the cart, and makes room for him. 

It means they’re squeezed against each other, shoulder to shoulder, and she wants to reach out and take his hand. Instead she sets the helmet aside and laces her fingers together. “Master Qui-Gon says I should try to sit in or near the greenhouse and _feel_ the plants as they grow, as they put out their leaves and flowers and fruits.”

Master Kenobi nods, encouraging. “Go on.”

“And sometimes I don’t want to sit with the plants. They’re so hard to understand. They’re distracting. So I study -- your old holos instead. Your fighting form. They called you a master of defense.”

“The form I am most familiar with is -- it keeps you alive, but it can wear you out, and then you miss the point of defending yourself in the first place. Better to defend yourself just long enough for your opponent to make a mistake, to underestimate you -- then you switch to something else, you attack and do your best to prevail -- ” He trails off. “I don’t mean to lecture.”

“I need to learn everything I can,” Rey says. “Not for this mission. I can’t carry a saber with me.”

“Since they don’t want you to call attention to yourself.”

“No staff, either.” Rey allows herself to pout. Even leaving that weapon behind, propped up in the corner between her bunk and the wall, had been a wrench. 

“Again, dearest, it’s so that you stand a better chance of not being recognized.”

“And the moment I reach for the Force I’ll reveal myself, and so much for hiding.” 

She grins when Master Kenobi snorts. 

And then there’s a brief touch to her brow, cool and fleeting and gentle. “Then it is well that you can remember living without the Force, don’t you think?”

She thinks about that. Then: “I’m supposed to be retrieving something from the Jundland Wastes.”

The presence next to her startles. “That would put you in reach of my old haunts.”

She takes his hand, then. “I can bring your things back.”

A sigh. “If you can find anything, you certainly have my leave to try. But we know about the desert, you and I, don’t we?”

She squeezes his hand, and nods.

“I would have liked to have gone with you for this mission,” he continues, after a moment. “Tatooine is -- I still think of it as a seedy spaceport writ large.”

“With dragons.” Rey thinks of the briefing materials that BB-8, bobbing contentedly next to her, had allowed her to peruse.

“The dragons were never really a problem,” Master Kenobi says. “If you left them alone they’d leave you alone. Everything else, however -- ”

“If I think of everything and everyone out there as Unkar Plutt I might just survive,” Rey says, and she’s wry and self-deprecating and the presence next to her chuckles, only a little bitterly.

“See to it that you do, dearest, I’d be quite put out if you showed up on -- my side of the Force.”

She glances at him. “Something else I’ll have to learn.”

“And hopefully not need to use for a very long time,” is the reply, with special emphasis on the last four words. 

Time ticks past on the chrono, and Rey counts down in her head, and when she reaches zero BB-8 bleats a quiet warning at her. 

“I wish I were flying with you,” Rey tells the droid. 

Temperamental shrilling complaint. 

“I know. You have to stay here and be good for Poe and Finn. And with luck I’ll see you all again very soon.” She gets to her feet and scrubs warmth into her arms. “Grandfather,” she says, trying to smile.

“May the Force be with you, dearest,” Master Kenobi says.


	21. give us books and give us roses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every year since 2014 I've written a ficlet on or around 23 April to commemorate St. George's Day, which is also celebrated as World Book Day. The ficlets usually include books and roses as part of their themes. Here's mine for this year.

Sunk very gently, very deeply into the moving tides and currents of the Force: Rey takes a careful breath, holds it for several seconds, lets it out. Her shoulders move. Her chest expands. The shrubs and soil and insects and trees, the moss clinging to the rocks and the vines working their way up the nearest set of walls, that must exist all around her -- they recede. She is sheltered from them by her closed eyes. Hands cupped together in her lap. Crossed legs on bare earth. The wind moans and tries to tug at her hair, at the thin braid that she wears just forward of her left ear. 

Inhale, hold, exhale. Images flickering in her mind. Children in short trousers and soil-stained sleeves, chubby fingers poking gently at fat wriggling slime-gray grubs in a garden full of roses.

She takes in the phantom scent of roses -- none grow on this world, as far as she knows, not even in the prized and protected greenhouses that are painstakingly moved from base to base. Sharp-sweet-spicy, elusive, the scent fades away one moment only to come back with a renewed breath and a renewed ferocity. Little heads bobbing up and down the paths lined with rosebushes that tower over them. 

In her mind’s eye Rey contemplates a rose. Softly fraying edges on the outermost petals, as though it had been chewed on, and she wonders what could actually prey upon this beautiful and magnificent flower. Several dark shades of red, with the tender delicate heart of it nearly black. Intricate whorls and whirls of petals. 

Smoke, suddenly, intruding.

Rey takes a deep breath and continues to meditate. The rose before her seems to take in the smoke, seems to be wrapped in it, the musk of its fragrance somehow undimmed.

The littles have vanished from the garden full of roses. 

The roses themselves seem to tremble, seem to shy away, and Rey feels -- fear. Fear with massive claws tipped in old dried blood. Fear that sticks to sharp teeth and predatory beady eyes, rolling around her in waves, overwhelming the rose -- 

_No,_ she thinks, and: _snap-hiss_. A cutting edge made of light. A weapon that belongs to a defender, a protector -- a _knight_.

Protect the roses she can’t see, the littles she can’t find. Does it matter what size or shape her opponent might be? She’d face down Starkiller Base itself with nothing but her own body, her own mind, and the strength of the Force.

A rose falls at her feet. Miniature toothed edges on delicately veined leaves. A long loop of a stem. She places the rose upon her brow -- it’s a crown, she thinks, and vaguely her mind offers her images of holos of the General in royal robes, in royal Alderaan white. The rose is a crown that she wears upon her head and she feels the fragrant nothing-weight of it even as she takes up her ’saber. Her enemy is in the smoke, circling, waiting, and she -- she won’t charge.

She’ll stay here, and be patient. Be ready. Be prepared.

Laughter, sweetly calling to her -- the laughter of children’s voices.

Shadows in the swirling smoke, stepping up to her, flanking her: they are not threats. They are her allies. Bright orange on one side, and white that isn’t faceless on the other. 

Roses come in orange, and white, and in so many other colors, too.

Rey brings her ’saber up to a guard position, just at the level of her left shoulder.

She only has to think it, in this something more than just mere meditation, and -- she knows. She is undefeatable, and this enemy will fall to her, and her allies will be with her every step of the way.

Inhale, hold, exhale.

Rey opens her eyes.

And perched on a flattish rock that’s half-overgrown with stubborn creeping vines with little circle-shaped leaves: Poe, who is twirling a long vivid green stem in his clever callused hands -- and at the end of that stem a familiar red-dark flower. 

Finn, who is reading -- is that a book? She’s only ever heard tell of books, of sheets of flimsi bound together between sturdy covers. Where did Finn find it? Will he let her read the book?

“Poe,” she says, and she draws their attention. Draws their smiles. “I thought roses didn’t grow on this planet.”

“They don’t,” he says. “I had this one flown in special. It’s a Yavin 4 rose.”

“Don’t forget this,” Finn adds, and Rey watches him reverently close the book. “Poe’s dad is lending us this book. A real _book_! He says it’s been in his family for a really long time.”

“It’s a story of a warrior who fought a krayt dragon and -- ” Poe blinks. He looks alarmed. So does Finn.

Rey shakes her head, and smiles. “A very beautiful rose. And a book with a good story. And the two of you -- I’m _happy_ , I hope you’re happy too.”

Her reward is the two of them wrapping her up in their arms. The weight of a book pressed against her skin, and the scent of a rose clinging to her fingers.


	22. memorial wall

They settle, for the time being, on a planet that loops long and slowly around its triple stars: rivers and forested hills and three moons visible above the horizon. Sweltering dawns full of long-lingering stars in their patterns; dusk rainshowers that other members of the Resistance joked about setting their chronos by; the nightly crooning chorus of birds and insects alike. 

There’s an order to the construction of the structures that make up the sprawl of the base: the command centers and the low-slung hangars and the extended infirmary first and foremost. Next come the food- and water-producing facilities. Then the various accommodations, and the mess halls. The training areas are less of a priority and that’s all right with her. She can train just as well in a gymnasium that’s missing its roof -- and this way, she can center her daytime meditations on the deep purple-blues of the sky that soars in its infinite dome above her.

No meditation today, however, and no training: it is a rest day on the base and most of the personnel she knows have decamped to the southern hemisphere of the planet: they’ve gone to see the ocean, so one of the maintenance droids explains to her. An ocean and a sprawling archipelago of islands. 

The General -- _Leia_ \-- had even gone so far as to order her brother to get in the _Millennium Falcon_ with her.

Maybe she’ll ask Finn and Poe to take her to that ocean, when it’s their turn.

For now she concentrates on her self-imposed chores. Greenhouses and growing things, and the black soil that sticks to her hands in large and small clumps. It smells like -- water, she thinks, but also of crushed fruits and trampled leaves. Even with the constant whine of the machines that keep the water circulating around the edges of the carefully-dug plots, it’s a peaceful place, it’s nothing overwhelming -- except perhaps for the corner that makes her smile whenever she walks past it.

A corner full of bright flowers. Profusions of blue and lavender and white and so many shades of red and orange. Rosy flush and brazen bright buds.

Someone is coming, and Rey puts her trowel and the tray full of tubers hacked into roughly palm-sized chunks aside, and rummages in her pocket for a pair of shears -- for she can sense that the being coming into the greenhouses wants flowers -- 

“Poe,” she says, and she smiles and hurries forward and tucks herself along his side. His arm is strong and warm as it winds around her shoulders. His hair smells like sweat and musk and lampberry conditioner. 

“I knew I’d find you here,” he says, and she presses a kiss to his temple, laughs as he tugs at a lock of hair that’s come corkscrewing down past her ear. “I’m almost sorry I introduced you to the idea of gardens.”

“No, you’re not,” Rey says. “Because if you were, you wouldn’t be holding on to those flowers I gave you.”

He laughs. “No, I’m not. We really aren’t.”

“Finn?” she asks as they press against each other from shoulder to hip to ankle. Plots and trellises sprawl out around them.

“He’s helping teach some of the weapons classes. We can go heckle him in a few minutes.” Poe suddenly looks both grave and gentle. “Had to do something, first.”

Wordlessly, Rey trails him: she watches him put his hands behind his back and stare at a pot full of tiny white flowers. He leaves those behind, moves on, chews on his thumbnail as he brushes his free hand down a tangled skein of green vines and peach-pink blooms. He moves straight past the roses in their shadowed dusky reds and the sunset-golds of the waling-flowers.

“You’re looking for something,” she half-asks.

“Something good.” A pause. She watches him get down on one knee, watches him reach toward a half-hidden pot. “Something like this,” he says, when he stands and turns around.

Dirt on his knee and on his wrist, but Rey only has eyes for the spray of blue flowers in his hands. Blue as the oceans of Ahch-To, she thinks, small and perfectly formed, each flower bearing four magnificently curved petals. Fat pointed buds, too, hang from the delicate branch. 

She looks into Poe’s eyes, she looks at the emotions on his face, and she sees -- pride, and also a loving grief. 

“Come on,” he says, and again she follows him. It’s so easy to walk in his footsteps. He always seems so sure of where he has to go.

Rey blinks when Poe leads her into one of the command center buildings, but she manages to nod back at the beings who greet them. 

“Here we are,” and Poe turns into a short dead-end of a corridor. The same featureless, reinforced walls, and the same gratings underfoot: but that’s not what she’s looking at. 

She’s looking at what’s _on_ the walls.

Images on flimsi, for the most part: names and faces, a large swathe of the galaxy’s species. Each image is carefully attached to the wall, together with a projection like a shelf. She reads the names. Some of the images carry handwritten annotations, handwritten inscriptions. Repeating phrases, like a pattern: _We miss you. Gone but never forgotten._

She sees Poe lay his flowers on the little shelf below the image of a woman. Wavy hair and scars in her face and a familiar easy confidence in her smile and -- 

Rey blinks when she clocks the woman’s name. _Shara Bey._

“This is -- a graveyard. Not the right word, but -- ”

Poe holds out a hand to her, and she goes, and she’s happy to let him lean on her. “This is where we remember the ones we’ve lost. Many cultures kind of share the idea, you see. The beings who have died are remembered by the ones who still live -- ”

She nods. She thinks back to a cairn of stones left behind on the lonely cliffs of Ahch-To. Three circles woven from rough branches and twine in the home of another scavenger on Jakku. 

“And that’s your mother,” she says, after a moment.

“If you think I’m a good pilot -- well, I learned a lot of things from her.” Poe’s smile is gently strained around the edges, and she kisses the lines in his cheek, and holds his hand. “There’s a grave, sort of, back home on Yavin 4 -- but I can’t exactly go back there, not that easily, so there’s this instead. I can remember her here, and Dad can remember her there. We carry her memory, together, even if we’re not in the same places.”

Rey nods.

She touches her hair, the three buns that kept the long strands out of the way, and wonders if she’s been carrying her own memorial all this time. 

A commlink chirps. 

“Poe.” Finn’s voice.

“Memorial wall,” Poe says, in reply. “Got Rey with me.”

“So that’s where you two are. You want to meet somewhere on the base?”

Rey reaches for the commlink. “Actually, maybe you should come here,” she says. “Help me hold Poe’s hands.”

Next to her, Poe laughs, softly, but she knows that his eyes are still fixed on the image of his mother.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
